


there is nothing i am hungry for except my silence and my scream and the sound of the only other wolf howling in the forest

by Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra (Haych_Aych_Ach)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Punisher (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, BDSM, Dom/sub, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Past Sexual Abuse, Revenge Fantasies, Stream of Consciousness, Vulnerability, chase play, narratives, y'all this is so fucked up i had to rewrite it to repost it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 13:28:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14450250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haych_Aych_Ach/pseuds/Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra
Summary: A late night between Frank and Maria Castle.





	there is nothing i am hungry for except my silence and my scream and the sound of the only other wolf howling in the forest

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [help me find joy in my subjugation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11637141) by [Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra (Haych_Aych_Ach)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haych_Aych_Ach/pseuds/Swiggity_swydra_fuck_hydra). 



The sun has set, and Maria hardly notices. It's not as if they're anywhere near anyone else; here, in this dark, quiet forest, far away from anything civilized, she feels like an animal who is only concerned with other predators being nearby her chosen prey. She's running and has been running for miles after him, Idris tracking and sniffing out Athena, chasing her since dawn broke and the countdown had reached zero. Maria had paused only twice, once to pee and once to pee and then eat, slowing down a few times to walk and drink water and shovel calorie bars in her mouth and then run again. She's so close now, and she wants badly to catch him before it's too dark and cold, because once she does she's going to tie his hands together and they'll go to the cabin she'd rented and they won't leave it for at least a day or so, and if it's very dark she might not succeed. Her legs feel nothing and neither do her lungs, except a kind of luminous joy that fills her whole body up from the inside and makes her think they ought to do it more often, run if not just chase, run and run, and it's been crossing her mind every few hundred yards that this is what humans are meant to do, this is why she's got a pursuit predator as a daemon, this is why she and Frank found each other.

He's smart at this, canny and sneaky, setting traps and false trails of scent and tracks and even once, sound, a tape recorder playing the sounds of his and Athena's huffing breaths, having Athena separate from him and howl to trick Idris into howling back, and Maria loves him the more she has to work at it, the harder she pushes herself. She can't help but admire the sheer fucking persistence of him, how he's managed to avoid her now, and she'll tell him all about it once she's got him, she'll tell him how impressed she is, she'll bite him for every hour evaded, and she fantasizes about it until suddenly Idris is nudging her and she stops, listens, and a-ha! There it is! And Maria waits, waits, and then chases when Frank's lulled into complacency, running like the wind, running so fast she feels like she's flying, and he's darting and weaving but she's faster, and she tackles him and there's a second of frozen terror where she thinks oh shit I went too far and then Frank laughs, and relaxes beneath her, submitting to her, and she kisses him while they're both breathless.

Behind her, Idris bit Athena's neck and now is cuddling her, Athena licking at her jaw and muzzle, and Maria feels so good and warm and electric, the air itself crackling. She stands up and gets out the rope from her backpack quickly--royal blue silk and wool blend, she'd insisted on a color and not being twine or handcuffs, she knew she'd just hurt him that way and trying to get to a hospital from this kind of place was something she never wanted to do--and ties his wrists together in front of him, ensuring the knot won't pull or yank or strain, and then kisses him more and stands them both up.

* * *

 

At the cabin, things are so, so good, that Frank is caught off-guard when the switch gets flipped.

He's never really sure what's going to flip it, is the real thing. Sometimes things any other person hates (having their daemon touched, live-fire exercises, calmly breaking the arm of a man who deserves it) are perfectly fine. Sometimes something just makes him angry, or cold, but he is still--there. Present. Existent. But other times...

Other times, some switch in his fucked-up brain gets flipped, and he is somewhere else, far away, perhaps inside Athena's skin, but more often inside a black hole, inside a void, fallen down into a sinkhole. There is nothing, and then there is coming back, and there is a humiliation that he has nothing to do with except to go work and want to kill something. Sometimes if he kicks Athena that helps, but once he did it in front of Maria, and her shock was somehow far far worse than anyone else's had ever been, and since then it's just not been an option.

(Maria is good at dealing with that for him, ordering him to go and do chores and tasks and projects and repairs, or even ordering him to just sit and let her curl up with him and to focus on her, because she was afraid. She knows that he cannot be still, he cannot think about it without falling back inside the hole that will one day be his grave, and she doesn't let him slip back down, and he loves her for it beyond words.)

But this time, it's even worse, because everything is perfectly fine, things are wonderful, Frank's sweaty and filthy and starvingly hungry and out of breath and beyond happy, she's caught him and captured him and overwhelmed him and he's in her bed (her bed always not their bed, if she ever wanted him gone he'd go, he does not touch it when she is not there, he does not lie on it when she is not home) and she's kissing him furiously over and over again and they're laughing and it's so good, Athena is a warm curl on the floor with Idris, who is trying to entice her to play waggling and jumping, and suddenly--the lamp's light curves--Maria's face is suddenly wrong, the nose is wrong, and the switch flips and he is nowhere and nothing, nonexistent, and he is not aware again until he is, and it is a bone-deep shame.

Maria is gazing at him gently, lying next to him in bed, and he's no longer tied up, she is further away from him and holding his hands, and he cannot stand it, not any of it, not this warm tenderness and her eyes just seeing and not overwriting him, and he turns and pulls away, unable to look at her.

There is a silence for a minute, and she says, "Did I do something wrong? The chase, or maybe the rope?"

He shakes his head. He does not know how to explain to her that anything she does cannot hurt him so much as the thing that is still, inexplicably, stupidly, hurting him.

"Or--the knife on the table?" Maria guesses further. She's trying to fix this problem, avert this curdled-milk feeling in his stomach, the way his back is a Gordian knot. She is trying to find a source of this pain. He does not want her to know it, half because she cannot, and half because if she could, he would never wish her to understand this. He does not want anyone to know this kind of thing.

He shakes his head. "You can't--even if you wanted to, you can't--do that."

"You mean no more knives?" Maria asks after a long minute, very unsure now, and Frank knows he ought to comfort her, but it feels beyond him.

"No," he says, and puts his head in his hands, and then twists and lashes out, punching Athena right in the side, once, twice, until Idris growls at him and gets between them and he draws back instinctively.

He stares at the pitch-black wolfdog, and sits down heavily back onto the floor, in silence. He can't speak. Athena can, though, and she turns and talks directly to Maria, fast and as if possessed, manic.

* * *

 

 _You don't understand_ , Athena says with her wolfdog-mouth, her teeth shaking. _You don't know, you can't understand, you can't make it make sense, none of it makes any sense, it doesn't. There was a man, who was sometimes five women, several men, ten, twelve, fifteen, I don't remember--they shined lights in our eyes, they made me be a termite, one of them had a queen bee daemon--I read the Tyger over and over-- one of them was ten feet tall, they scraped the ceiling, they were--they shined lights in my eyes--they put me in a cage--there were bright flashing lights--they took so many pictures, kept them, they put them in the mailbox and we had to fish them out before someone found out--_

And she is not even partway through her babble-prophecy when suddenly her human body's hand was on her mouth, holding it tight and shut, and she shook violently and gazed into her own eyes, her haunted face, and he said _no, we cannot tell it to them, it cannot be said_ , and she did not agree, it had to be said, she had to say it, it was unspeakable but here and now, with Maria and Idris, their above-them, their love, the only person who could ever possibly know and love them, the only person who ever would, it was finally possible to say even the outer shapes of it, to try and vomit all back up, and he understands her now, he knows, and he hesitates, turning to gaze at Maria, and he says the final thing that he can say, possibly forever, and certainly for now.

He hesitates, but he says it, he and her with their mouths, and she can feel him dissolving as he says it-- _you cannot understand, I cannot explain it, it is too crazy to be believed, it is too bizarre, I don't know how to explain it, I don't understand it, you'll think I'm crazy_ , and then without her he shakes, convulsing almost, as if there is something hard and horrific stuck in his stomach that he needs to remove but can only retch around.

* * *

 

Maria is afraid, and confused, but she can see in Frank's face that barely moves the exact thing he is not saying. She can see the lines of please don't make me say any more, and while she can't stop him from arguing and fighting with Athena, she absolutely knows what she can say to that.

"I believe you," she says softly, even though her mind is reeling at the details his daemon had spat out, horrified that those were things that happened to him. "I believe you, every part. But you never have to tell me any more. It--" she struggles for words, not sure how to say it, what the right thing to even say is, how to say that she had accepted his complete belonging to her but that did not mean that she would actually make him do everything that she could think of or even want, that she called him mine and would chase him if he ran to be captured, but that she would never, ever, trap him, never become a monstrous thing that he would have to escape from. "You're mine," she says after a minute, calm and firm and truthful, trying to hand him her own heart as much as he gave her his, "But that doesn't mean--that all your things are mine. That--the word--your story is yours. I won't take it away from you," she pleads, hoping desperately that it would make sense, that he would not feel afraid of her any more.

Frank's face sags with relief, and his whole body looks limp and exhausted now.

"Let's--eat," she tells him after a second. "Beef stew, we've got plenty, and bread too. Let's eat," and Frank is gazing at her and nodding with deep lines of exhaustion in his face, something small and screaming in his eyes as he says, slowly, "Yes, ma'am." She looks at him the entire time, making herself watch, making herself look at him and not flinch away, and somehow it is the easiest thing in the world when it's Frank. She loves him anyway, and as she thinks about it more while she takes responsibility and feeds them both, it's not as if it's some sort of revelation that Frank had something extreme and bizarre and horrible happen to him. She's known that since Athena whispered to Idris that they did not have a childhood because they could not remember it.

A very small part of her wonders, briefly, if he _could_ remember, but-- and then she dismisses it immediately. She doesn't live inside his head, and she takes a breath and imagines any doubt flowing out of her, to live in this rented cabin and be left behind. She chooses to believe everything he says about this. She knows him; he does not lie.

There's a long period of quiet eating, and Frank leans over more and more as he does, and he tells her after he's done, "I could--try to say--what she was trying to say earlier, ma'am."

She gasps a little, shocked at the sheer vulnerability of that, the nakedness in the face of fear, and then shakes her head. "I don't need to know everything," she tells him seriously. "I don't--it doesn't have to be made sense. I don't need to know everything."

"If I want to..."

"Of course," she says, and gazes up and down, at his hunched-down shoulders, at his eyes not meeting hers. "Do you want to?"

He's utterly silent for a long while. Finally he looks at her and says, "I don't know, ma'am."

"Okay," she says, and hates the word a little bit, how stupid it sounds now. She finishes her own bowl, and turns her head to see Idris around Athena, licking at where Frank had hit her earlier. She's not sure what to think or feel about that, either. And then something occurs to her, something stupid other people do, and she adds, "I also--I will never make you tell anyone, or the cops, or anything. Never. Or the names, or--you can say what you want, any level."

"Ma'am...what would you do with any names?" he asks her, something curious and--was that turned on in his face?

She blinks slowly, and then decides to be totally honest. "I would hunt them," she says slowly, turning it over in her head. "Maybe--with my job resources, but not officially. Just look into it. I would find them, after a long time maybe, and then I would hunt them closer and closer, until I found them. And then I would..." and she notices his face becoming more and more interested, more and more curious. His mouth opens, he licks his lips. She realizes what he wanted, and she is glad to give it to him.

"I would hurt them," she says softly, one hand reaching out to meet his fingers, which are tapping at his knuckles. "I would have bought a nice big shotgun, the kind that's easier to clean than the custom one I've got now," and she leans in, Frank hot with desire, and one of her hands goes into his pants and his pupils get bigger, his eyes black holes as she continues, "And I would follow them where they went, getting closer and closer, not letting them even see me until I could blow their brains open in broad daylight, where anybody could see them die," and Frank's hips jerk once before he stops them, and she smirks a little and works her best technique, faster and smoother, dry like he begs her for it, "And for some of them I wouldn't even do that, wouldn't give them a short death, I'd just--you know how the Vikings would rip out people's, uh, intestines, their guts, and hang them up on trees? I'd do that, and I'd do it when they were drugged, and I'd wake them back up afterwards," and Frank's breath is faster, his whole face is full of a kind of adoration she's seen before but not quite this intense. "And I'd, I'd shoot one or two in the stomach and march them into the woods so they'd die slowly--" and Frank comes at that, and she kisses him.

Distantly she's shocked by herself, by the brutality of the things she's told him, but as the night goes on and Frank becomes more and more okay she becomes more okay as well, calmer. Maybe there is a deep darkness inside of her, but Frank, the person who would have the right to see it and name it wrong, instead seems to just dive headfirst into it, begging her for more and more descriptions as they shower and she ties him up again and kisses him rapturously, rewarding him over and over, feeding him chocolate and whispering to him that she'd eat their eyeballs one at a time. By the time they're falling asleep she finds herself at ease with herself in a terrifying way, no longer even guilty for her thoughts. Taking revenge isn't the same as hurting someone to start with, Idris whispers to her as he climbs up onto the bed, Athena curled into him, and she nods. Besides, she hasn't actually done any of these things yet, but she knows deeply inside her bones that she would, she will, if he tells her and they don't have kids by then then one field in the woods will get slippery with blood before she's done.

The next day, Frank proposes to her.

* * *

 

After she's gone, after he finds the photographs and tracks down the names, he does everything Maria said during that beautiful, rapturous night, in precisely the order and manner in which she described every single thing. To honor her. To love her, though she is dead, because he is still hers, forever.


End file.
